
Forest and Stream 
in Illinois 



.'•- ■. •:.»- 



X5fk 



Schnepp & Barnes, State Printers 

Springfield, III. 

1919. 

17691—2500 



&; of d. 

MAV 2« |919 



STATE OF ILLINOIS 
DEPARTMENT OF REGISTRATION AND EDUCATION 



Forest and Stream 
in Illinois 

By STEPHEN A. FORBES, Ph. D., LL. D. 

Chief of the Natural History Survey Division 



[Printed by authority of the State of Illinois.] 



STATE OF ILLINOIS 
DEPARTMENT OF REGISTRATION AND EDUCATION 

FRANCIS W. SHEPARDSON, Ph.D., LL.D., Director 

STEPHEN A. FORBES, Ph.D., LL.D., 
Chief of the State Natural History Survey Division 



THE BOARD OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND 
CONSERVATION 



Francis W. Shepardson, Ph.D., LL.D., Director of Registration 
and Education, Springfield, Chairman, ex officio. 

David Kinlet, Ph.D.. University Dean, Urbana, representing the 
President of the University of Illinois, ex officio. 

John W. Alvord, C. E., Engineer, Chicago, representing Water 
Resources. 

Thomas C. Chamberlin, Ph.D., Sc.D., LL.D., University of Chi- 
cago, Chicago, representing Geology. 

John M. Coulter, Ph.D., LL.D., University of Chicago, Chicago, 
representing Forestry. 

William A. Noyes, Ph.D., LL.D., University of Illinois, Urbana, 
representing Water. 

William Trelease, Sc.D., LL.D., University of Illinois, Urbana, 
representing Natural History. 



FOREST AND STREAM IN ILLINOIS* 

[By Stephen A. Forbes, Chief of the State Natural 
History Survey.] 

I come to you this evening with a very definite pur- 
pose, that of asking the interest of the Academy, and 
of this representative audience in general, in certain 
measures intended to improve the conditions of life 
for the people of Illinois. The topic I have chosen for 
a very superficial treatment — all that my time permits 
— is that of the forests and streams of the State, 
such as they were a hundred years ago, such as they 
have now become under our management or neglect, 
and such as we hope to leave them to our descendants 
of a hundred years hereafter. 

Stream and forest are so frequently associated here 
in Illinois that where we see a forest we naturally look 
for a stream somewhere within its heart, and where we 
see a river we expect to see a forest bordering or im- 
bedding it. And yet, the two are in many respects at 
quite opposite extremes. A forest is stable, stolid, and 
old. An old tree is, I suppose, the oldest living thing 
in the world. It digs deep into the earth and brings 
to expression all the properties of all the soils in which 
it grows ; it has concentrated in its trunk and in its 
tissues a permanent record of the weather, the seasons, 
the climates, of centuries — of milleniums, perhaps, in 
such giants as the red woods, it preserves unchanged 
in its heartwood particles deposited there a quarter of 
a century or more ago. 

A flowing stream, on the other hand, is the imme- 
diate product of its immediate environment, respond- 
ing quickly to rainfall, to drouth, to changes in tem- 
perature, and even to the unstable winds. Its material 
substance is rarely more than a few weeks, perhaps 
only a few days, old. In the complexity of its sensi- 
bilities and the variety of its responses, it is so much 
like a living thing that one needs to be a biologist to 

* Read December 8, 1918, at an open meeting- of the Chi- 
cago Academy of Sciences, held in celebration of the hundredth 
anniversary of the admission of Illinois into the Union. 



study and to understand it. And to the biologist both 
stream and forest are captivating subjects of inquiry, 
for to him a river is not water only and a forest is not 
wholly made up of trees. Each is an environment and 
its content. The birds and insects, the shrubs and an- 
nual plants of a forest area are as much a part of the 
forest as are the trees themselves, all being brought 
and held therein — an associate group, an ecological 
society — by conditions as compelling as those which 
assemble men in cities ; and the plants and plankton of 
a river, its crustaceans, clams, turtles, fishes, and even 
its water birds, are there just as the water is in and on 
which they live, because the special features of the 
particular environment impel or compel them into each 
others' company in permanent association. 

So, when I speak of the study of a river or of a 
forest survey I must ask you to think of them as a 
survey, a study, of this kind of a forest, of a river in 
this sense of the word. 

THE FOREST 

A hundred years ago, according to the careful esti- 
mate of one of the most competent Illinois botanists 
of the last century,* 30 per cent, of the area of this 
so-called Prairie State — some ten or eleven million 
acres, in other words — was covered by trees. Just 
how much of this forest primeval remains to-day in 
Illinois we have no means of knowing at all exactly. 
After a general survey of our more important forests 
made in 1908-10, the total woodland area of the State 
was estimated at two million acres; but the U. S. 
Census of 1910 reports over three million acres of 
forest still remaining on what the Census Bureau calls 
farms — that is, on tracts of land each under one man- 
agement, on some part of which farm products are be- 
ing raised ; and we get no hint of the area of additional 
forest properties on which no farm crops are grown. 
All are agreed, however, that such forests as we have 
remaining — a possible third of our original heritage — 
are being commonly mismanaged, or rather not man- 
aged at all. Neither the State nor the owner of forest 
lands has any definite forest policy. "While our wood- 
lands contain a large variety of valuable species, their 
silvicultural condition is very poor, and their pro- 
ductive capacity is much below normal owing to short- 

* Dr. Frederick Brendel, of Peoria. 
6 



sighted methods of cutting and to injury from grazing 
and fire. Their ownership is favorable to forest man- 
agement, but there is little appreciation of the possi- 
bility and advantage of increased yield by proper 
methods of treatment, and practically all industries de- 
pendent on local timber supplies are on the decline." 
And this abuse of our present holdings is not by any 
means the worst of our errors. A vast acreage has 
been cleared of trees and brought under the plow 
which ought to have been left in forests permanently. 
The Soil Survey of Illinois has now made progress 
sufficient to warrant general statements concerning the 
State as a whole, and from the director of this survey 
I learn that there are about six million acres of Illi- 
nois land that either are or ought to be permanently 
in trees, the soils of this great tract — 25 per cent, 
larger than the whole State of Connecticut — being bet- 
ter adapted to the growth of trees than to any other 
agricultural use, and its broken surfaces making it 
liable to virtual ruin by erosion when brought under 
the plow. Much of it has, indeed, already been so 
ruined, and more of it has been abandoned after un- 
profitable attempts to cultivate it as farm land. The 
"abandoned lands of Illinois" is an expression strange 
to the ears of most of us, who still think of the State 
as an area of inexhaustible fertility. 

We have already begun to search for a remedy for 
these conditions. Besides a commercial survey of 
twenty-six counties made in 1908-10 to which I have 
already alluded — a survey made conjointly by the 
United States Forest Service and the Natural History 
Survey of the State — we have this year begun, with 
the aid of a whole-hearted group of Illinois naturalists, 
a survey of a much more thoroughgoing type. Several 
members of the faculties of the University of Chicago, 
the Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, 
and the Eastern Illinois State Normal School, and the 
teacher of botany in the Lake View High School in 
Chicago, have given the State, without compensation, 
large instalments of their vacation time, assisted also, 
in several instances, by their graduate students work- 
ing on the same generous terms ; have made careful 
surveys of the tree growths of selected tracts in 
Jo Daviess, Cook, Vermilion, La Salle, Adams, Coles, 
and Cumberland counties ; and are now preparing re- 
ports to be illustrated by photographs and maps for 



publication in the Bulletin of the Natural History 
Survey. 

And we shall seek this winter to secure the perma- 
nent appointment of a forestry expert as a State for- 
ester, and shall then turn him loose in the State to 
study the situation, to interview, to lecture, and to 
publish in a general educational campaign, and to come 
to conclusions as to what it is best to do for forestry 
in Illinois, so that two years hence we may have a 
rational, correct, and well-settled program of conser- 
vation and development to present to the Governor 
and the Legislature for their consideration. 

It is our plan to survey not merely the present 
forest areas, but to cover all the broken country 
especially adapted to the growth of trees, coming to 
conclusions as to the best use to be made of each tract 
of land, the kinds of trees with which it might best be 
planted, the rate of growth of the more important 
species in each situation and in each kind of soil, and 
the returns to be expected from forest culture in com- 
parison with other uses of this land. And we shall not 
for a moment leave out of sight the fact that an Illi- 
nois forest is much more than an equipment for 
money-making, that it is often of greater use for edu- 
cational, recreational, and esthetic purposes, as in 
parks and other places of public and private resort, 
than it is for the production of wealth; and all these 
various values must be taken into account in a public 
survey. The life of a forest as a whole, and not of its 
trees alone, and all the ways, whatever they may be, in 
which our forest lands may be made valuable to man, 
are the real subjects of study in a thoroughgoing 
survey. It is such a survey as this that we hope to 
see established in Illinois — one which will bring to 
bear upon its problems and applications the highest 
science, the soundest practical judgment, the shrewd- 
est private enterprise, and the finest public spirit of 
our people ; and it is for such a survey that I have to 
ask the approval and the assistance of this Academy, 
and of all those concerned to whom these presents 
may come. 

THE RIVER 

The problem of the protection, utilization, and de- 
velopment of our aquatic resources is much more com- 
plicated and difficult than that of our forests, because 

8 



there are many discordant interests centered along our 
water courses — commercial fisheries interests ; the in- 
terests of the sporting fisherman, the two often an- 
tagonistic ; a great agricultural interest in the enclos- 
ure reclamation, and cultivation of land subject to 
overflow ; manufacturing interests, which poison the 
streams with the wastes of huge factories ; municipal 
interests, which find in the nearest river the most con- 
venient and the cheapest means of sewage disposal, 
and the interest of those who live beside the stream, 
or resort to it for labor, business, or pleasure, that it 
shall be kept inoffensive if not inviting, and healthful 



if not altogether clean. 



Permit me to take, as a marked example, the largest 
river of the State, the one from which Illinois derives 
its name. Two hundred and seventy-three miles in 
length, formed by the junction of the Kankakee River 
and the Des Plaines, and receiving now a large con- 
tribution of Lake Michigan water by way of Chicago 
River and the drainage canal of the Sanitary District 
of Chicago, it may be said to rise at the very gates of 
this great city. It is in many ways a remarkable 
stream, unlike any other in the country. "It is pecu- 
liarly characteristic of the State of Illinois, and next to 
its prairies, was its leading natural feature. Its broad 
bottom-lands, the bed of a former outlet of the Great 
Lakes system, covered with huge trees, completely 
flooded when the river is highest and holding many 
marshes and shallow lakes at its lowest stages, are a 
relic of the time, not so very far removed, when the 
limpid waters of the great glacial lakes rolled down its 
valley in a mighty flood on their course to the south- 
ern gulf. It gave to the discoverers of Illinois the 
first means of access to our territory, and on its banks 
was built the first fortified post. It was the first great 
artery of transportation into and through the State, 
and among the first colonial settlements were those 
established on its banks." It was, until recently, and 
perhaps is yet, by far the richest river in the country 
in the product of purely fresh-water fisheries. Ac- 
cording to the U. S. Census its yield in fishes only, in 
1908, was equivalent to a dollar for every two feet of 
its length in prices paid to fishermen, or in those paid 
by the consumer, to more than two dollars for each 
foot. Its frequently beautiful and occasionally pictur- 
esque scenery is attracting more attention every year, 



and the time is surely at hand when the people of Illi- 
nois will learn to appreciate and develop this great 
gift of nature in the various directions in which it may 
be made to serve their interests and their pleasures. 

Just now, however, it is at the very lowest estate of 
its whole history. Virtually all the sewage of Chicago 
is delivered to it, and the same may be said of every 
city and town upon its banks. By diking and drainage 
operations it is being robbed of the haunts of its water 
birds and the principal breeding-grounds and feeding- 
grounds of its fishes, and corn will presently be grow- 
ing every year on some 200,000 acres of forest, marsh, 
and lake over which its waters spread a few years ago 
in time of flood. 

A brief outline of a few of the main features of 
its recent biological history will help you to see what 
is happening to it and why, and what ought to be done 
by us if we are to give to our descendants of the com- 
ing century as much as we should of the values which 
came into the hands of our predecessors a hundred 
years ago. 

A critical moment in the history of the stream was 
January 17, 1900, when, by the opening of the drain- 
age canal of the Sanitary District of Chicago, the Illi- 
nois again became, after a lapse of ages, a partial out- 
let to the waters of the Great Lakes. The flow through 
the two canals, the Illinois and Michigan and the sani- 
tary canal, both deriving their waters from the same 
source, was equal in 1913 to the average natural flow 
of the river at Peoria, a hundred and ten miles down 
stream. This increment from the canals is of course 
virtually constant at all seasons of the year, while the 
natural flow of the stream varies greatly from time to 
time, with the result that, when the river is lowest, 
about four-fifths of its water comes from Lake Michi- 
gan, and when it is highest, only about a tenth, the 
ratio of Michigan wat^r to that derived from the wa- 
tershed of the stream, rising and falling inversely to 
the rise and fall of the river gages. The river conse- 
quently can not now fall as low, under like conditions, 
as before 1900, the rising river begins sooner to spread 
over its bottomlands, the overflows are more extensive, 
the bottom-land lakes are filled to a greater depth and 
cover a larger area, and the water recedes more slowly 
after a rise, all these effects being necessarily more 

10 



obvious and pronounced on the upper smaller part of 
the stream than on the lower larger part. 

^ Now, the productivity of a river depends, other 
things being equal, upon the area of shallow water 
along its banks and draining freely into it from its 
border-lands, for it is in such shallow water that plant 
and animal life is, generally speaking, most abundant. 
The immediate effect of the opening of the canal must 
consequently have been to increase the total yield of 
the stream, and this conclusion is confirmed by many 
comparative collections made by us by quantitative 
methods for long periods before and after 1900. 

Coincident, however, with this admission of lake 
water to the river has come another powerful influ- 
ence in the admission of the total sewage of Chicago 
as carried by the canals ; and this has worked in 
opposite directions in the different parts of the stream. 
The organic matter of the sewage in process of de- 
composition so fouls the water of the upper river, 
especially in midsummer, that its natural plant and 
animal life is then virtually destroyed or displaced, 
and characteristic sewage organisms take its place. I 
quote from a survey report published by us in 1913 : 

"In the seventeen-mile section of the Illinois from 
Morris, nine miles below its origin, to the upper dam 
the river reaches its lowest point of pollutional dis- 
tress, becoming, when very hot weather coincides with 
a low stage of water, a thoroughly sick stream. Its 
oxygen is nearly all gone; its carbon dioxide rises to 
the maximum ; its sediments become substantially like 
the sludge of a septic tank; its surface bubbles with 
the gases of decomposition escaping from sludge banks 
on its bottom ; its odor is offensive ; and its color 
is gray with suspended specks and larger clusters of 
sewage organisms carried down from the stony floor 
of the polluted Des Plaines, or swept from their at- 
tachments along the banks of the Illinois. On its 
surface are also floating masses of decaying debris 
borne up by the gases developing within them, and 
covered and fringed with the 'sewage fungus' and the 
bell animalcule usually associated in these waters. The 
vegetation and drift at the edge of the stream are also 
everywhere slimy with these foul-water plants and 
minute filth-loving animals. * * * 

"The normal life of the stream practically disap- 
pears in the absence of oxygen; its fishes withdraw to 

11 



neighboring unpolluted waters ; its mollusks, crusta- 
ceans, ordinary insect larvae and other more or less 
sedimentary forms disappear to be replaced mainly by 
slime-worms and Chironomus larvae in the sludge ; 
and its chlorophyll-bearing plants linger only along the 
edges in shallow water. With the advent of cooler 
weather and higher river levels, most of these marked 
symptoms disappear, and a few fishes may even make 
their way into the stream, particularly in the vicinity 
of the mouths of creeks. In spring and in fall, bub- 
bling from the bottom ceases, the odor of the water is 
no longer repellant, a few invertebrate animals reap- 
pear, and the oxygen ratios rise to a considerable frac- 
tion of those normal to the Kankakee. The extent of 
this seasonal oscillation depends, of course, upon the 
rainfall and temperature ; and the opposite extreme is 
reached in winter, when midstream oxygen ratios may 
be fully as high as those of the summer time for Chil- 
licothe and Peoria." 

A careful survey, chemical and biological, made 
last August and September, showed us that the foul- 
ing of the waters was extending steadily down stream 
at an average rate, during the last six years, of five to 
ten miles a year,* and that the Illinois River from its 
origin at Dresden Heights to Peoria Lake, ninety- 
three miles down, is now nearly deserted by fishes, at 

* The recent degeneration of the Illinois River above Peoria 
is shown by the following table, bringing into comparison the 
oxygen content of the water over a sixty-mile stretch of the 
river from Depue to Pekin as shown by analyses made in the 
summers of 1911 and 1912 and again in July and August, 1918. 

Ratios of Dissolved Oxygen in Illinois River Water, Stated 

in Parts per Million, Summers of 1911 and 1912 in 

Comparison with Summer of 1918. 

Parts per Parts per Ratio of 

million million later period 

Stations. 1911,1912 1918. to earlier. 

Depue 2.65 0.16 1—16.6 

Hennepin 2.41 0.25 1—9.6 

Henry 2.35 0.65 1 — 3.6 

Lacon 2.45 0.92 1—2.7 

Chillicothe 3.27 1.17 1— 2 . 8 

Pekin 5.61 2.08 1—2.7 

What these oxygen ratios signify as compared with those 
of a tolerably clean water may be shown by a compai-ison of 
them with the ratios of dissolved oxygen for the Kankakee and 
with those of Depue Lake. August 21, 1911, the oxygen of the 
Kankakee River just above its mouth stood at 8.47 parts per 
million at 10 a. m., and at 10.15 parts per million at 2 p.m., the 
increased ratio in the afternoon being due to the oxygen given 
off by water-plants under the influence of sunshine ; while in 
Depue Lake, September 11, 1911, the oxygen ratio stood at 12.92 
parts per million when that of the river just above the lake was 
2.65 parts per million. 

12 



least in summer, its dominant life then being that of a 
contaminate stream. Peoria Lake, however, a shallow 
expanse of the river about seventeen miles long and 
a mile and a half wide at its broadest part, serves at 
present as a kind of a check valve against the ex- 
tension of these conditions farther down the stream, 
and in and below the lake the life of the river becomes 
nearly normal. The sewage load of the stream is 
steadily increasing year by year, however, and how 
long it may be before this frail barrier is broken 
through of course we can not say. 

From another point of view, we may regard the 
river water as a fluid and flowing soil, the basis of the 
growth of aquatic organisms, and Chicago sewage as 
a fertilizer enriching this soil and making it more pro- 
ductive when the raw sewage elements have been 
worked over by decay and oxygenation, and thus made 
available as food for aquatic plants and animals, and 
through them finally, by way of fishes especially, as 
food for man. This process of conversion and assimi- 
lation of the organic contents of a flowing stream of 
course takes time, and time in a river means progress 
downward; and it takes temperature also, proceeding 
rapidly with midsummer heat and slowly in midwinter 
cold. The current of the Illinois has been accelerated, 
of course, by the volume of lake water added to it 
by the canals, but it is still slow enough to give suf- 
ficient time for the conversion of much Chicago sew- 
age into available food by the time it has reached the 
middle course of the stream, and this middle course is 
also much the most important for fisheries. At pres- 
ent, therefore, the Illinois fisherman and the consumer 
of his fish have, so far as we know, no definite reason 
to complain of the total effect of the influx of city 
sewage, for it has probably profited more than it has 
injured them. Although it has destroyed the fishery 
of the smaller, less important, upper hundred miles of 
the river proper, it seems to have increased the yield 
of the eighty miles next following. It is especially be- 
cause the pollution of the stream is increasing that we 
have reason to apprehend more serious economic 
consequences. 

And now of recent years there has come on another 
still more disturbing factor, that of the reclamation 
and improvement of the rich river bottom-lands and 
the drainage of many lakes whose beds are now fields 

13 



of corn. This process is inevitable because it is highly 
profitable, bringing in returns much larger than could 
be got in any other way ; but it leaves the Illinois River 
much as Samson was left when shorn of his locks 
by the self-seeking Delilah. Already the annual yield 
of the Illinois has fallen off at least one-half since 
the last census data were obtained in 1908 ; and this 
process is also progressive, although the greater part 
of the bottom-lands which are reclaimable have now 
been reclaimed. The effect upon the river is to im- 
poverish its biology in two different ways, by drying 
up its most productive waters and by hemming in its 
flow in times of flood, thus speeding up its current so 
that it carries its sewage content more rapidly down- 
ward, leaving less time for its transformation and 
utilization, and pouring it out unused at the mouth of 
the stream in much larger ratio than formerly— an 
enormous loss of food resources to the Illinois which 
inures possibly to the benefit of the Mississippi, into 
which our stream empties. 

Such is a very sketchy description of only a part 
of the vicissitudes to which the long-suffering Illinois 
is being subjected during these latest years of its 
checkered history, and there are more yet to follow. 
What will probably be the biological effect of the 
changes contemplated by the waterway engineers in 
making the Illinois again a connecting link of trans- 
portation between the Great Lakes and the Gulf, is a 
subject for some other time and place. 

And if you ask me what is to be done under the 
circumstances in the public interest, I shall have to 
answer that I do not know, but that I want to find out. 
When present and prospective drainage projects are 
completed, there will still remain, in the Illinois valley 
below La Salle, 170,000 acres under water or subject 
to overflow at times of highest flood, a valuable fish- 
eries property in itself and capable, as we may believe, 
of material improvement if intelligently handled in the 
public interest. Some day we shall have, and I hope, 
quite soon, a fisheries experiment station on the Illi- 
nois equipped to do for the important streams of the 
State and for the great rivers which nearly surround 
it, something like what the agricultural experiment 
station does for Illinois farm lands. We have in hand 
such a project, in fact, for which we propose fish 
ponds and a headquarters building on land, and with 

14 



the other equipment, chemical, biological, and prac- 
tical, mainly on houseboats similar to the floating 
laboratory of biology which we have had for more 
than twenty years on the Illinois, all capable of being 
shifted from place to place, as may be necessary, in 
our extensive field. By the general and special studies 
possible with such an equipment, a policy of manage- 
ment and control should be worked out in the general 
interest, such as an intelligent and resourceful owner 
would establish if our public waters were his private 
property. 

The problem of streams pollution consequent on 
current methods of sewage disposal lies, of course, 
quite outside the field of our Natural History Survey; 
but any citizen may say, as I do now, that the intelli- 
gence, conscience, public spirit, money, and power of 
the city of Chicago and of the other municipalities 
concerned are surely sufficient for its solution. A 
people which will do in a spirit of boundless self- 
sacrifice what we have done in the past two years for 
the welfare of foreign nations, will not balk perma- 
nently at the few millions needed to make our waters 
wholesome, clean, and physically decent for the use 
of the people of Illinois; and I believe that this 
Academy may help materially to hasten the day when 
the law of the State forbidding the pollution or defile- 
ment of any stream or lake in Illinois by the deposit, 
addition, or discharge therein of any foul or injurious 
substance such that fish and other aquatic life is de- 
stroyed, may be fairly and wisely enforced by the State 
department upon which that duty now rests. 



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